Tribune Opinion: University of Northern Colorado’s breach of public trust with President Kay Norton’s assessment is inexcusable, harmful

University of Northern Colorado Kay Norton address hundreds during the State of the University address on Wednesday in the University Center on the UNC campus in Greeley. Among the talking points Norton talked about was the future of UNC's campus commons project.

What we know is this: The University of Northern Colorado spent as much as $45,000 in 2014 to pay a consultant to assess the job performance of President Kay Norton.

Norton herself, along with members of the UNC Board of Trustees, picked 55 people for the consultant to interview and provided other information as needed, according to the contract signed with the consultant.

What happened with the assessment after that, though, is fuzzy.

The UNC Board of Trustees in a Dec. 19 response to a list of student demands, which included the demand to fire Norton, cited the 2014 assessment — without offering details — as evidence of Norton's strong performance.

However, when The Tribune submitted a Colorado Open Records Act request to the university seeking to obtain a copy of the assessment, UNC's response stated there were no records of the evaluation.

That's difficult to understand. It's hard to imagine any evaluation worth thousands of dollars would generate no documentation. Indeed, the contract university officials signed with the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges for the assessment expressly states all documents generated from it were to be the sole property of UNC.

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The Tribune sent a follow-up letter to UNC regarding the records and the protocol that saw the records disappear within two years. We are still awaiting a response.

We may come to learn of a reasonable explanation for all this. But it's hard to imagine one.

Indeed, the most likely explanations of what happened to records of Norton's assessment raise troubling questions. Were they lost through simple incompetence? Did officials purposely decline to document the assessment? Doing so would provide a technically legal, if ethically questionable, means of avoiding Colorado's law and legal precedent, which have consistently held that performance evaluations of public officials must be public. Perhaps the most troubling question is this: Were the records "lost" on purpose to keep them from public scrutiny?

Whatever the explanation, we're astounded.

The basic principle of Colorado's sunshine laws states the public's business must be done in public. That is solid bedrock. Without it, trust in our institutions erodes. Nowhere is that trust more important than at UNC. The university is one of the most vital institutions in our community, and Norton is charged with leading it through challenging times. It's a task for which she earns an annual salary of $316,318 in public money.

Norton has made her share of difficult decisions in her tenure. We've applauded many of them. But it's fair to say public trust in her and in the institution she leads has been strained at times. The unforced error UNC officials have made with their bungling of her assessment will only further strain that trust. That will only harm UNC and our community.

This is one of the worst failures of government transparency and accountability we have seen in a long time. It's simply inexcusable.